Yet in reading the recently released issue of Jahazi entitled ‘Reclaiming our Cultural Heritage’, one finds that Russians are no worse than were the European powers who came to conquer and colonise Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. Whether one is talking about Germans, British, French, or Portuguese, European colonisers all slaughtered families, destroyed whole villages and wreaked havoc on people’s cultures.
That’s the well-documented impression one gets from reading the rich collection of 28 deeply-researched essays contained in Jahazi, the cultural magazine published by Prof Kimani Njogu and Twaweza Communications.
In the past, Jahazi has primarily addressed issues most closely related to East Africa, and particularly Kenya.
But in ‘Reclaiming Our Cultural Heritage’, Kimani has reached out to Pan-African scholars who have lots to say about their countries’ imperative need for not just reparations for all the damage done to the region since the slave trade began, but the restitution of all the cultural artefacts that were looted by colonisers and which now reside either in private collections all around the West or prestigious museums like the British Museum in London, Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and others in cities like Paris, Rome, Berlin, and New York.
It’s a marvel that this one issue contains so much history associated with so many African nations and states. And while there’s one unifying theme, the need for virtually every African country to reclaim its cultural heritage after whole civilizations were ravaged viciously, still there is no redundancy in the stories.
